


Dead Water

by ponderinfrustration



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
Genre: Alternate Universe - Castaways, Animal Death, Blood, Death Rituals, F/M, Inventing Religious Beliefs, Multi, Nature Magic, Polyamory, Rituals, Sexual References, Stranded, bones - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-01-07 10:16:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18408593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderinfrustration/pseuds/ponderinfrustration
Summary: He has been on the island for twenty years. She has only arrived, cast away with her father until their little boat fetched up here. But her father died and now Christine is alone with the island's existing resident. It is easier to not remember her past life, as she learns to survive, and learns Erik, and he learns her in turn.





	1. 1

She is not certain when it was that she lost track of the days. Two months ago? Three? Before or after her father died? (And those days of illness at its worst blur into one in her memory. He was frail to begin with, before they started their journey, before they were cast away, but life on the island, the damp heat of summer, only made his chest worse. She knew he was going to die before it ever happened – could feel it in her bones and tried to deny it.) All she knows is they’ve passed through the cool of spring and humidity of summer, the grass has dried to white and the nights bring dampness that spurs an undergrowth of green.

It is autumn, or must be. The year turned three-quarters round, and no true way of knowing.

Erik says the winter brings storms that lash the trees with wind and rain and rattle the shelter he’s built, and allowed her into. She’s always liked storms. The land is so peaceful when they’ve passed.

The shack might fall apart around them in the wind, bury their bones together not much more than a stone’s throw from where her father lies. And who would ever find them? The goats in their scavenging. A panther attracted by the smell. The birds would pick their bones clean, ants take up residence in the spaces between. And eventually, someday, someone will find them. Some fellow castaway, who will excavate what’s left of them and assume they are lovers left from an ancient race, know not their names or faces (or that Erik once wore a mask, long gone, his face become the same as hers) and might invent a tale of them for their own amusement. A queer sort of immortality.

(She gave up her last belief in the immortal afterlife when her father rattled his last breath.)

Sometimes, she thinks, she has become just as hard as Erik.

But he no longer flinches from her touch.

And the travesty of his face is not so very terrible, knowing they are the only two.

* * *

 

It was after her father died, that he first accepted her touch. Not the first night, nor the second, but one night she flung her hand out in the darkness and his hand was there, his long callused fingers squeezing hers back. And she has wondered, ever since, whether it was merely a happening, a coincidence. Or did he choose to lie so close to her that night, decide that, perhaps, he should. Did he fear she might die too, and leave him alone again?

She has not asked. She has not the words to ask. But every night they lie close by each other, touching only at the hands, and his heat seeps to her between the goatskins that wrap them, and perhaps she will trace her fingers lightly, lightly, up his wrist, and he will shiver and try to pull away but the firelight flickering over her shoulder makes his eyes glow through the darkness and she will fix him with her gaze and he will still, submit to her fingers as they stroke the marks of what can only be shackles around his wrist. And his eyes will close, and he will sigh, and she will return her fingers to his and squeeze his hand before she, too, allows herself to sleep.

They do not speak at night.

* * *

 

They speak little by day. His voice is hoarse with how long he has been on this island, but most of the creaking roughness has eased since she and her father landed here, and she quite likes the gravel his voice has retained in its depths. It flows down through her ears, tingles in her fingers, catches beneath her navel. If there are men sirens perhaps this is how they sound. This aging wisdom under their words, their hair peppered grey flowing down their backs and hands rougher than their voices but gentle too, so gentle. His voice makes her long to press herself close to him, to feel the full length of his body, to pass her hands over his back, his chest, to feels for scars and ease the tremor that sometimes catches his hand and makes his eyes grow distant. She has never touched a man before, not even in the chastest of ways, though there have been kisses (and she must not think of those, must not remember the face that received them, that bestowed them, so different from the one that lives here with her. And so she does not remember those kisses or that face. They are all part of a different world, a world long past.)

They do not speak of their pasts, not in detail. She knows there were travels, to far distant lands, a war, a captaincy of a ship. And she has told him of leaving her homeland, of ports and ships, and a stretch of water still as glass when the wind did not blow for days. But it’s a silent agreement that what happened to bring them both here is not for putting into words.

They speak, instead, of the goats. Of the sky, and the birds. Of the panther, the snakes, the shy deer so difficult to hunt. Of making arrows, and pitfalls, and sharpening fine edges onto stone. They talk of fruit. And they talk of meat, and fire-building, and blood. The consistency of blood, the binding of blood, the colour of blood, different types of blood and what they are good for, and the island gods are ever present in his words.

She wears ragged goatskins when she bleeds. And when the cramps come he heat smooth flat stones in the fire, his knuckles knead the base of her back, ease the pain away with the stones against her stomach. And she thinks, maybe, this is how people lived once. Before there were cities, before there were ships.

In goatskins, in shacks. And paint pictures on rocks with blood.

* * *

 

She does not know why he decided to reveal his face. There was simply one morning, long after her father died, when his mask came away, and she saw him for how he is. The skin pale as bleached bone under the sun. The hollows of his cheeks. The gaping hole where his nose ought to have been. His lips are thin, but they cover his teeth. His eyes, and she already knew his eyes, but his eyes glowed brighter than ever from deep in a face like a skull.

It was a shock, at first, but when he made to put the mask back on, she stilled his hand.

His face was soft beneath her touch.

* * *

 

It was her father’s last request, for Erik to play his violin. And as she held her father’s hand, so numb it was as if she had been hollowed out inside, watching his closed eyes, the shallow rise and fall of his chest that weakened as his breaths grew more distant, longer spaces in between, and blood trickled from his lips no matter how much she dabbed it away, as she sat with him, and tended to him, the music flowed over them both, the fire their only light beneath the stars.

And when, at last, his hand grew cold in hers, and the blood stopped coming, she realised she could not remember the last time his breath rattled in his throat. He simply lay there, still and silent beneath her touch, and the music stopped.

It was Erik who wrapped him in goatskins. And it was Erik whose fingers trembled as they stroked over her cheek, and came away damp with tears.

She has not cried since.

And the violin has not lain silent a night.

* * *

 

Sometimes they sing. They sing, and his singing voice is higher, purer than his speaking one, and it twines with hers to ring over the island, as if they are ancient gods set down here. And sometimes she wonders if that is how he came to be, if he is one of the island gods of which he speaks, if he is not truly a man but a fallen angel. It would explain his voice, its strange hypnotic power, explain his face, and she asked him, one night as they lay beside each other not touching, if that is who he is, if he is the island given form. And he got a far away look in his eyes, his lips twisting, and whispered, “not quite, my dear.”

* * *

 

He cuts her hair, one day in late summer, with a sharpened edge of flint. And after, they braid the golden strands into ringlets and set them aside. She cuts his in turn, and they bind the strands together, his and hers entwined.

“When winter comes,” and his voice is low, “we will dip them in blood and hang them. To appease the gods.”

The island gods. He talks of them often, the way they give and take, how they bring life and change the seasons and send the worst of storms when they are dissatisfied. The gods are sacred and on a cool summer’s evening they sacrifice a kid goat and paint the blood onto their arms.

When, at last, the last of the dried scarlet flakes off, he nods, pleased.

“They are appeased.”

* * *

 

They sit and braid necklaces by the fire. Snake teeth onto leather, wear one each and hang the rest around the shelter with the ringlets of blood-set hair. It is as horrifying as the stories of a shaman’s hut, but there is something of a shaman in Erik, and how he reads the animals and the signs and calls forth fire on the coldest nights, his hands never hesitating.

And she looks at their offerings hanging from the ceiling, and his lips twist into something that approximates a smile but is not a smile, not really, more a painful grimace that someday become a true smile.

“For the spirits.”

* * *

 

He keeps three nanny goats, and milks them every morning before the sun is up. The milk is rich and creamy, the smell of the goats warm, and it fills her up to drink it.

* * *

 

With water she crushes violets and little bluebells and makes a new pigment to paint alongside the blood. She runs it over her arms, her face, her bare legs, staining her skin red and blue and green with grass stains like a woman in a travelling fair and she might parade herself for spectators while Erik played and hid his face, and they would walk away hand-in-hand, coins jingling in their pockets.

But there is no one to see on the island, only Erik, and he sees her efforts and nods approvingly.

* * *

 

The sun filtered through gaps in the hides, cast the inside of the shelter a golden glow, and she painted with her colours on the inside of the warm leather, Erik stood behind her with his violin, so close she could feel his breath on the back of her neck, as she daubed scenes of what she did not know but which together might tell a story.

* * *

 

He taught her to survive. Taught her how she might live here, how she can live with him. Taught her about fires and goats and weather and what to eat and how to make clothes.

And when the winter storms come, lashing the island with wind and rain and cold bone-deep, they break their own vow of distance and press themselves as close as they can.

She teaches him, that night, of kissing. The wind howls outside. The fire flickers and dies. And she presses her lips to his on impulse. He shrinks back and she follows him, parts those thin hesitant lips with her tongue. And when, at last, his tongue brushes hers in response, she holds him tighter, and they vow, silently, in the darkness, to never let each other go.

* * *

 

They both know that they are never getting off the island.


	2. 2

It was early morning, the first time he saw them on the waterline. A blonde girl and a grey-haired old man with a violin, and upon realising that they had _not_ come to save him, he turned away and moved on to checking his traps.

It was two days before he saw them again, and that time only because he had rescued the girl from a pitfall, fortunately not one that he had installed sharpened stakes in. She told him her name was Christine, but his voice refused to work to answer her. What use had he for a voice when he was alone for so long?

What use had he for a mask? When it became apparent, long ago, that he was not to be found, not to be _rescued_ , he burned the mask he landed wearing. And it was only that morning he saw them on the waterline that he fashioned a new one, some impulse reminding him that he must. So long, and yet his fingers remembered it. The goat leather is hot on his face, but his face is one from hell, and he will not be killed over it by a girl and an old man on his own island.

His voice, though. How could he ever explain to them about the gods, if he could not speak?

And so he practices in the darkness, to the stones, to the fire, to the goatskins, learning the shape of words like a magician muttering incantations to find one that works, and when at last he is able to croak a simple _Erik_ , he reveals himself to the two.

The old man, clearly ill, clearly dying if his pallor and cough are any indication, smiles at him and says, “I feared my daughter was seeing things.”

And when he learns the year from them, it is twenty years since he was cast away.

* * *

 

It is not long until the old man dies (a single rotation of the moon, but what is a single rotation of the moon in  twenty years of rotations?) and shortly before it, as the girl sleeps, her father beckons him closer in the darkness, and asks him to take care of Christine.

And maybe it is because the man presumes kindness in him, or maybe it is simply that he has been alone here for so long it has sunk into his bones and his blood and weighs heavy in his chest, but he agrees and when, a few nights later, a lung haemorrhage carries the man away, Erik plays the first violin he has touched in more than twenty years, and wipes the tears from Christine’s cheeks.

* * *

 

Things have drifted in, as long as he’s been here. Remnants of shipwrecks, chests of ladies clothes. Occasionally a chest of captain’s clothes that he wore until they fell apart half-rotted, weakened before he found them by salt water, and went back to his hides and goatskins. Most of it he burned. Sometimes there were jewels, and he spent days burying them all along the perimeter of the island to appease the gods. And sometimes there were useful things, shovels and picks and sewing things. Knives that eventually dulled, like the books fell apart in his hands, their pages scattered to the wind.

The island provided all he needed, and he paid it tribute. And in return it brought him the goods to help. He only regrets, now, burning the ladies’ dresses. Such a waste, but he had not known Christine would come.

(The bottles of alcohol he took but a sip from, and condemned them to the fire. And as the flames roared high into the night, the gods rejoiced.)

* * *

 

He might ask her if they still whisper of him in the ports, of his grotesque face and the ship he stole in a mutiny, the captain he killed, the ones he butchered in a burning rage that lasted him months after they slit Butler’s throat before him and he was powerless to do anything to stop them. The water ran red and it was all he saw for weeks and weeks and weeks, red ribboning out upon the waves long after Butler sank.

Do they whisper of that at all? Or has twenty years erased him from the world?

He comes close, so many times, to asking. To _knowing_. But some insurmountable force stops him, holds his tongue tight every night that he tries, an ancient magic born from the trees and the waves, like that which held him silent in his loneliness, and eventually he stops trying.

The gods do not want him to speak of it, and that is enough.

* * *

 

He can well imagine the sort of situation that brought her here. An inherent fear of women on ships, never mind there have always been women on ships, known or not, and Sorelli was equally beautiful and fierce and he might have loved her alone if it were not for Butler and Nadir already sharing his bed, and yet somehow they made it work. But after twenty years Sorelli must be forgotten now too, or cast away like he was in a mutiny, or killed. And memory has always been fickle, and the waters here were prone to death even in his day.

(They called him a demon, when there was no wind to stir the sails, and bashed his head and put him in the boat. And he was grateful that though Butler was already long-dead, Nadir was safe on Sorelli’s ship, too ill to have joined them when they were forced to haul anchor in the night.)

Surely they called Christine a witch.

* * *

 

It was an odd curiosity, that forced him close to her that first night. But when she grasped his hand he let her, and her touch is so light it makes him shiver, as if he is being touched by a ghost, as if something of Butler lives in this slip of a girl, and he is held firm even as he wants to run, and her eyes are blue as the sky, not green as the grass.

Every time the imagined green becomes blue again, her fingers tracing the scars on his wrist, he closes his eyes.

Christine’s eyes are blue, and they make his heart stutter.

* * *

 

He heard stories, once, of men whose arms weakened with their hearts, and every time his arm tingles numb he wonders if those stories are true, wonders if he is bound to leave her too, so soon after she has come to him.

He will not have her starve to death on his island. So he teaches her all she needs to know and more besides, warns her to always appease the gods, and plays her father’s violin that the music may live in the trees and shroud her safe forever.

* * *

 

It was an impulse, to show her his face. An impulse and a desire and an instruction, the island whispering in his ear. He learned to listen to the island long ago, and its voice is what has always kept him alive, is the reason he is here with her.

And so he removed his mask beneath the command of the gods, and felt hands on his face for the first time in longer than his skin remembers, and Christine brushes the tears away, and smiles.

* * *

 

It should trouble him, how fascinated she is by the blood. But as the smell rises coppery and sweet from it in the heat of summer, and as she dips her fingers into the red running from the goat’s neck and paints a sunset on a rock, he remembers how she cradled his face the first time he showed her, how she stilled his hand and cast his mask away, and thinks that, perhaps, they are not so very different.

He lies her down each time her time comes and with heated stones and his own hands (Sorelli liked his hands on her back, swore they must have held magic as he massaged the tension from the base of her spine) he takes her pain from her, and offers it into the wind.

Her tired smile makes something half-dead stir deep in his gut, something unseemly and wrong and he quashes it, but sometimes when he is alone his hands itch for remembered flesh, seek to touch and to feel.

He clenches his hands into fists, and blood wells from crescent cuts in his palms.

He smears it beside her paintings, and watches as the droplets run together.

* * *

 

She learns the ways of the island faster than he did, appeasing the gods alongside him. He never thought a companion would be suited to this, though more than once he felt he had one, was sure there were eyes on the back of his neck. And as the winter mists rolled in he saw bodies moving through it, heard voices calling out to him though he could not speak to respond.

He hid from the ghosts and found it safer that way.

She calls out to him and her voice echoes in the air. He reaches for her hand and finds warm skin. She lies beside him at night, and he feels her heat and in the darkness as she sleeps softly, he realises that all that there was has ceased to matter.

There is only Christine, and the island.

* * *

 

She has forced him to remember the things he spent twenty years attempting to forget. Remembering brought storms in the summer and a fire that swept the island, dry grass and trees snapping before the flames like kindling. The gods know that there is nothing to be gained from remembering, _he_ knows that, but she forces him to it with her eyes and her grace and her fingers weaving flowers together.

He takes a kid goat on the night of the full moon, brings it to the riverbank, and slits its throat. A feeble last bleat, and it washes the water red.

* * *

 

The night the wind howls and the fire dies, and her lips meet his for the first time, he pulls back. Pulls back to spare her, because he knows how loving the dead feels. Pulls back to spare himself, because though there is no one to take her away, he does not trust Death to not find a way, does not trust his island to not provide it in spite of all his sacrifices in its name.

But her lips are persistent, and her fingers at his throat cupping his neck are insistent, and as he gives in to her touch and her taste and parts his lips for her, he wonders if he is truly damned now, wonders if touching an angel in a way less than chaste will be what condemns him.

And she touches his skin, and kisses his scars night-after-night, traces them with her tongue though she does not go further and does not reveal her flesh to him, and he does not seek it, does not touch even as that half-dead thing flares back to life beneath her lips, his loins clothed as she mouths his chest. He fights to hold himself still, to not press against her, to not shift his hips, and wonders if this is perhaps his penance, if letting her touch him without touching back is how he is repaying for all he has done, his debts called in in agony after twenty years of loneliness.

He submits to her, a beaten dog before its master, lets her see him and kiss him and know him as the island desires and denies his own pleasure, battles against the rise of it inside him and the evidence outside and knows that she makes him feel less alone, makes him feel as if he has substance for the first time in longer than he dares remember, that he is more than a ghost condemned to wander forever, and if this is what she wishes, if this is what fills the gaping hole inside her he sees reflected in her eyes, then it is his duty to do this for her, to be this for her. And if this act saves him from the fire, so be it.

* * *

 

The first time she unclothes for him, spring has died away into summer again. She stands before him radiant as a goddess cast down, framed by the sun, curve of her hip and fullness of her breasts, hair glowing gold, and he swallows and closes his eyes lest her brightness blind him. It is a sin to look directly into the sun, a crime to meet a queen’s gaze, blasphemous to look clearly at a god, and with eyes closed he draws her to him, holds her, brings her pleasure with his lips, caresses her skin until his hands burn. And each time she comes to him he closes his eyes and holds her close, feels the softness of her against him, and with his hands draw the low moans from her that are the payment for his worship, and he drops to bended knee and kisses her.

* * *

 

She asks him to forsake his clothes, that second summer, and calls it an act of worship. Who is he to ignore a goddess, even one not of the island born but borne on a tide from the northernmost lands? So he walks in his bare feet, sun hot on his once-hidden skin, scars on show to the world, and she does too, and they paint each other’s bodies in blood, crushed sand in their skin and the dust of clay. She smells of hide and earth as she lies beside him, thumb rubbing the back of his hand. And her voice when at last she speaks whispers of the wind through the grass, rustling the small creatures free.

“This appeases them too,” she whispers, and kisses him.

* * *

 

He promised to keep her safe.


	3. 3

She believed in a god once, when she was a little girl and even not so little. A god who laid down the rules of sin, and sent his son to walk amongst men. But how could those things that were said to be sin be wrong when everyone was doing them in the ports? When there was so much sickness and so much cruelty without them?

There is no sickness here on the island, no cruelty. Just she and Erik and the goats and the deer and the panthers and snakes and birds. There are only the gods to listen to, and the gods can be appeased.

That god that they said was the true god, maybe he holds power somewhere. But if he holds power, then why did he let Erik be born with such a face, knowing what would happen? Why did he let people hurt him, give him those scars? Why did he let her and her father be cast away?

She is at dangerous risk of dwelling on the past, and she cuts her palm with flint. The fire hisses and cracks as the blood drips into it, but the gods are satisfied.

And surely these gods, the gods who brought her and Erik together, who let them live, killed that other false god, the one who wore a mask of kindness to hide his cruelty.

Erik traces a finger over her wounded palm, bows his head and kisses it.

Her blood is salty off his lips.

* * *

 

She admires the form of him in the river as he washes his hair, kneeling in the water, black and grey waves swirling around him as he combs his fingers through to loosen the dirt and knots. He pulls his head out, long hair flipping over his head to hang down his back as water droplets glisten in the air.

She swims through the water to him and he smiles at her as he rises to his feet, standing legs spread apart, water barely reaching the creases of his hips though it comes to above her navel when she stands. He never smiled last summer, her first summer, but this summer it lights his eyes, makes the thin skin crinkle at the edges and she reaches up, brushes those fissures tracing from the corners of his eyes like cracks in the earth. The riverbed sand is soft beneath her feet as she steps into his waiting arms, reaches up, and kisses him lightly on the lips.

His tongue is soft as it caresses hers.

* * *

 

She lies him down in the long summer grass, sun beating hard upon them. Ropy scars crisscross his chest, his stomach, slash clear through one nipple and how the original wound did not kill him she will never understand, and she traces them lightly with a single fingertip. The whisper of pressure makes him shudder, and she kisses his mouth, kisses his neck, kisses slowly, gently, along the edge of each scar, the ropy ones, the small ones, the ones on his arms, the ones on his legs, the one high on his inner thigh near the crease of his hip, and here the smell of him is strongest, the smell of heat, the smell of _Erik,_ and she inhales deeply, lets it fill her lungs.

She rolls him over and kisses the ones on his back, and he sighs into the grass, and shifts.

She never asks what happened to him, what gave him these scars, where he gained them. There are things of which it is better not to speak.

She blesses the scars with flowers, and feels in her bones that it will appease the gods.

* * *

 

He captures a deer in one of his traps, and it feeds them for weeks. The skin is left to dry beneath the sun, and he carefully turns it and works it. It disappears and he plays the violin as she sings over the fire, and then the skin returns, transformed into a new soft shirt for her.

She kisses him and draws him into her arms and they sway slowly by the fire until it dies to embers, and the sun peeks above the horizon, casting the sky green.

* * *

 

She weaves baskets out of thin strips of bark that he cuts, and uses them to collect berries. Some of them she eats, and some of them she feeds him, and the remainder she crushes to form a new pigment, and takes into the shelter. She paints new scenes on the inside of the leather, scenes of him and scenes of her, scenes of goats and of sunsets and of deer, and he smiles at her, the smile that has come to make her heart falters, and declares it beautiful.

She twines her fingers with his hair, presses herself to him, and his mouth tastes of their love.

* * *

 

They wound a deer and bring it back, and she collects the blood as he holds it down. Some of it she sets aside as an offering, some she pours into the river as an appeasement, and the remainder she paints on the rocks to catch the sunlight.

In the early morning, she lies beside his sleeping body in the shelter, strokes his hair where it spreads over her breasts, and watches the amulets hanging from the ceiling. The ones of their hair, the ones of teeth, the way they turn slowly in the slight breeze, catching the light, casting red and gold down upon them. Sometimes, she thinks, it is the single most beautiful thing she has ever seen, and then she remembers Erik in the river, smiling at her, eyes shining gold as the sun on the water, and knows that he supercedes all the other beauty in the world.

* * *

 

Sometimes he wanders off, and she will not see him for days. She dozes, and tends the goats, weaves and paints and sews, and longs for the feel of him beside her again. If she listens closely she can hear him play, the violin’s precious notes carried to her on the breeze, and she sits outside in the cool evening air, wrapped in hides, and listens as the music inches closer and closer.

He crests the hill at last as the light fades from the sky, and she has a stew of meat and wildflowers waiting for him. He kisses her afterwards as they lie together, and smiles.

* * *

 

And sometimes it is she who wanders off. She who needs to see the island, to feel the wind through her hair. She finds new flowers for pigments – yellow and orange and gold – and takes them back with her, with feathers and delicate bones, weaves them together into chains and amulets with long grass and thin bark and the flexible branches of saplings. They are offerings to the gods, infused with her touch, and some of them she drops into the river on her way, and some of them she carries home to him, and he plays as she bathes them in blood.

* * *

 

He traces her skin at night, his fingertips as light as the whisper of a ghost. She closes her eyes and simply _feels_. Feels him beside her, long and lean, the hollow of his ribs, the jut of his hip, his breath tickling her neck as his fingers circle her navel. He is permitted to touch, she has told him this, has told him it is a form of worship and told him the gods can be appeased in many ways and this is one of them, but he is shy of her still, of her body and how she leans into him, especially at night, so she guides his hand, those long beautiful fingers, and whispers that it is all right. Everything is as it should be.

Their touch upon her most sensitive skin makes her shiver.

* * *

 

They braid each other’s hair by the fire. Feathers in different colours – red, yellow, brown, white, black, iridescent blue – and flowers woven in between the strands, making use of what the island has given them. They wear the braids until the pieces fall out, slowly, one by one, and when the last one falls they collect all the small things and burn them, mix the ashes with a little water and paint them upon each other’s skin.

It washes off when they bathe in the river, but they repeat it each time the moon waxes full, all through that second summer, and into the cooling chill of autumn.

* * *

 

Under his direction, she collects the bones of everything that’s died for them – every animal they’ve eaten, every kid goat they’ve sacrificed, and keeps them in a pile in a hole in the ground, what has not become amulets, what has not already been offered up. And sometimes the amulets are made from the bones of tiny animal skeletons they have each found, and so she adds the remaining unused bones from these skeletons to the others in the pit. And every time the moon wanes to its slimmest crescent before it briefly disappears from the sky, they stand side-by-side, and he nicks the tips of their fingers, and together they squeeze three drops of their own blood on top of the bones.

These bones have helped to sustain their blood, and their blood makes an offering to appease the most difficult of gods.

* * *

 

Their love is god-given, she has decided. Is island born and island purified and island-granted. And so every act of love is an offering, an appeasement. Every kiss, every caress, every whimper she elicits from him with her touch, every moan he teases from her with his lips, wandering her, exploring her.

They would not have each other if it were not for the island, would not love each other. Their offerings are more than sacrifices, more than paintings of blood and flower pigments, more than braided hair and necklaces of teeth and weavings of things island-made and island-born. Their offerings are every touch they give each other, and every smile. Every time they sing in the glowing firelight, every time he plays for her. Their offerings are how they hold each other close and how she listens to his heart beneath her ear and traces his scars and how they paint each other. How they tend to the goats and how he kneads the monthly pain from her back and how he dips his head between her legs to kiss her inner thigh.

She lays it out for him one night, when the first of the winter storms has passed, how everything they do for and with each other is an act of appeasement, however small, however great.

He kisses her lips, and kisses her breasts, and holds her tighter beneath the goatskin and whispers, “I have known for some time that you are an island goddess.”

And she looks into his golden glowing eyes and whispers, “There is part of the gods within each of us.”

* * *

 

She releases him from his history that night. Untethers him from his past. And as he breathes the names of his once-lovers into the darkness and murmurs in a language foreign to her ears, she traces the scars on his chest and cuts a new one. The blood wells out, dark red and relieved, and she dips her fingers in it, brushes it on the goatskin walls of their shelter and when the last flames crackle she kisses him.

He was waiting for her, she knows. The gods assured he would be here when she came, and their payment is this. His blood and his past and the knowledge of those who touched his body before her.

She surrendered a boy to the gods when she came. He will rest easier at night, having surrendered his ghosts.

It will relieve the ache in the arm he massages every morning, and every night.

She smears the blood across his chest, cuts her palm and presses her own into the wound, and he smiles faintly at her through the darkness.

“I free you,” she whispers.

* * *

 

He sleeps for three days, his skin burning as she nurses him and kisses him, the wound bleeding sluggishly though her own sealed by morning. She paints his blood on the rocks, and when at last it stops coming he opens his eyes and looks to something past her that only he can see, and she knows what she has done has saved him, has spared them from retribution for his melancholic memories.

The storm that night is barely a whisper, and he sleeps quietly in her arms.

* * *

 

She takes him to the river, bathes the blood from him and while he lies in the water she cradles his head as he sleeps off the weakness.

And when she kisses him, his lips move feebly beneath her own.

He wakes, and she eases him from the water, lays him shivering on the riverbank, his lips tinged blue, and warms him with her own body until he is ready to move. And she takes him home, and dries him by the fire, and with her mouth and her hands, she traces him, and caresses him, and holds him.

His hoarse gasps as he bucks against her are far from his whimpers through the fever.

* * *

 

There is a final great act of appeasement they have not yet offered up. One final consummation, usually reserved for a marriage bed. Their marriage bed is the goatskin they sleep on, but she has learned to listen to the island. And the island insists that between the storms of winter is not the time for it.

But when the time is right, she will know.


	4. 4

They make love for the first and only time during what he estimates to be early in her third summer on the island. He is tired deeper than he has ever known before, the pain that throbs in his arm more than he can ignore, and when she comes to him by morning light he cannot resist.

She lies him down beneath the sun, a goat skin all that is beneath him and the burning ground, and there she straddles him, there she loves him, and it is like dying, is like being reborn, is like the stars exploding in the heavens. He cries out and shudders and sleeps and she mops the sweat from his brow and kisses him and covers them both with another skin, holds him close and safe beneath it.

He wakes, after, to the cool of evening, and rolls over to look into her sleeping face. He kisses her and she wakes, and now she lies beneath him, the moon shining full in her eyes as he kisses her neck and fits himself to her and when, at last, they are each sated again, they lie beneath the sky of stars, sweat cooling on their skin, and sleep the sleep of the unburdened.

* * *

 

Three days later, a boy in a boat crashes into a rock.

Christine is paler than he has ever seen her since the night her father died, and it is at her insistence he pulls the boy from the water. He is unconscious, and bleeding from a wound to the head, barely breathing as Erik carries him back to the shelter and lays him by the fire.

He does not wake for two nights, and Christine is enthralled by him, refuses to leave the boy’s side, drying his hair and mopping the blood and rubbing his back as he gags and chokes on the water in his lungs, thrashing weakly until at last he lies still. And Erik feels a flicker of something that might almost be jealousy, if he were not so tired, if Christine did not still hold him close at night and kiss his lips.

She refuses to let him wear a mask, even with the risk that the boy will wake and attack him.

“He will simply have to grow used to it,” she insists, and kisses him, and he gets the impression she is talking about more than his face.

* * *

 

It is nearing dawn of the third day when, at last, the boy’s eyes flutter open. They are a darker blue than Christine’s, his hair a lighter blond and his moustache is thin. The complete picture is a pleasing one, but the boy is sick for hours after waking, and when at last he lies back shivering, hair sticking to his forehead with sweat, he grasps for Christine’s hand and she lets him take it.

Erik draws a deep breath to steady himself.

“I came looking for you,” the boy whispers, gaze still fixed on Christine’s. “It took so long, but I finally found a ship that would take me. And now I have found you.”

* * *

 

It comes out, in bits as the days pass. How the boy, Raoul, was a naval officer who met Christine in a port and fell in love. How he had to leave with his ship but she wrote him, and when the letters stopped coming he worried. So he asked questions where he could and finally, after months and months of searching, found the story. Of how she and her father had gotten on board a ship, and how they had been cast away in dead water. How he searched until a ship agreed to look for her for an extortionate fee, and when the search proved futile and they hit dead water he, too, was cast away.

Erik looks on the boy with a softer gaze after that, and agrees that he can stay.

* * *

 

The moon has waned to a slim crescent, the night that Raoul comes to him. Christine is asleep from being ill of late. Her courses have not come, but Erik is not worried. The island giveth and the island taketh away, and the price of survival is clearly her blood. It is a relief, to think of her free from her monthly pain, and when she rests he strokes her hair and keeps her comfortable by the fire.

Raoul sits beside them as she sleeps, and a shiver runs through Erik when the boy takes his hand, fingers still soft beneath their new calluses.

“My brother told me stories of you,” he whispers. “About the things you did and what was said happened. And they whisper of you sometimes in the ports, but I think it is lies”

Erik’s breath catches in his throat, the world tilts around him, but when Raoul squeezes his hand it rights itself, Christine still sleeping with her head in his lap, and in the firelight glow Raoul is as pale as an angel, skin faintly golden. “It’s true,” his voice is faint. “All of it.”

Raoul shakes his head. “I have decided it does not matter.”

* * *

 

Raoul comes to him again, mere nights later, and kisses him. Christine is bathing in the river, and Erik freezes in his arms, but Raoul’s gaze is steadying as he lowers him to the ground.

“She and I have discussed it,” he whispers, “and if you are amenable to my loving her, she is amenable to my loving you.”

Raoul is god-sent, he knows. And if this is what the gods want, then it will please them for him to acquiesce.

“I am amenable,” he whispers, and when next Raoul’s lips meet his, his part ready to greet him.

* * *

 

That night Christine lies between the two of them, and smiles as they take turns to kiss her.

* * *

 

Raoul comes to him in moonlight. Raoul kisses him and touches him and leaves him gasping and just when the stars are spinning above him Christine takes his head in her lap and runs her hand over his chest, brushes his lips with hers, her taste soft and sweet as berries, and he is home.

* * *

 

It is a cool night near the end of summer, when they offer Raoul’s memories to the gods. He lies half in the river as Christine parts the skin over his heart with the edge of flint, and Erik supports his head in his lap, hand resting on his neck. They watch as he bleeds, rivulets running down his chest, down his side, his face bone pale beneath the waxing moon. Christine paints the blood upon herself, paints it upon Erik, paints it upon the stones and a new goatskin and on the bones of a snake. And she cuts her palm, and cuts Erik’s, and they each press their wounds to his.

 _We are yours,_ it means, _and you are ours, and we all belong to the gods._

Erik kisses his soft dry lips, and Christine smears the blood over his throat and whispers, “I release you.”

They carry Raoul back, daub his blood on the shelter walls and lay him by the fire. He plays the violin until the boy drifts into sleep, and then they lie each side of him, and hold him, and wait.

When he wakes, two nights later, the fever has burned away and his eyes are clear. Christine lays her hand over his navel, and kisses him.

“Now we are free,” she whispers.

* * *

 

Blood is the most supreme offering to the gods. He knows that. Has always known it though he thought it true once of the gods of the sea. They rejected him for it, cast him away to here. But he has come to see, more and more lately, that what he always thought was wrong. The sea did not cast him away; the island called him. Called him to its shore, called upon his men to mutiny and banish him. And what he thought of as twenty years of abandonment, of loneliness, was really twenty years of waiting.

Of waiting for Christine. Of waiting for Raoul.

* * *

 

The grass turns, and the world changes.

Her belly grows all through that autumn, and he lays his hand on it at night to feel the new softness of her, kisses the fullness of her breasts. He did not expect that there would be a child, not after all his years, not from their one day of love. But a child there is to be, and he always knew her as one of the goddesses.

She paints Raoul onto the inside leather of the shelter, paints herself with her growing belly, paints all three of them together. Sometimes she grimaces with the movement of the child within her, but Erik is ready and holds her closer. He and Raoul see to her every need, and he sings to her and to his child in her womb, as Raoul massages her shoulders and rests his cheek against her hair, his eyes closed.

She paints with goat blood, and explores their bodies with her hands, and sometimes he finds her cradling her belly, and talking, softly, to the baby nestled inside her.

He and Raoul kill a panther, and wrap her safe in its hide.

* * *

 

He has spells of weakness, lightheadedness, and it is Raoul who steadies him, Raoul who holds him close to ease the trembling in his muscles, who brings him back to solid land. And afterwards it is Raoul who lies beside him, shoulder-to-shoulder, barely touching even as their fingers are twined beneath the goatskin, and promises, quietly, to not tell Christine.

* * *

 

He rubs blood and pigments and tree sap into her growing belly to ease the discomfort of its swelling. Raoul kisses her and massages her breasts in his cupped hands because she says it eases their heaviness. He massages her back while Raoul holds her, and heats flat stones for her to lie on, and with his fingertips brings her relief in any way he can.

And afterwards she kisses him while he runs his hands over Raoul, while they lie pressed to each other and sweating, and he wonders while on the edge of sleep if, maybe, the island saw fit to send him a young god to worship alongside his goddess.

He is but a humble supplicant before them.

* * *

 

He plays his violin through the storms of winter to drown the wind and preserve their unborn child from fear, and sprinkles goat blood over bird bones and the teeth of a panther as if a ritual of his own making can keep her safe, and slits his weakening arm to add his own blood to the mix and empower it. It is Raoul who finds him when the storm has died, soaked to the bone and half-conscious, and who wraps his arm in goatskins to staunch the blood, and carries him back to Christine.

* * *

 

Afterwards he almost dies in a burning fever that lasts three days. Poison races through his veins as he shivers and his eyes roll. He thrashes and cries out, blind to the world, their touch like fire, fingers clawing at his throat. The flames are all he sees when at last he lies still, breaths growing ragged and his heart throbs and stutters as the gods sing for him and him alone. He is on the point of crossing over, ready to surrender, pain squeezing tight in his chest, his pounding heart about to fail when lips brush his, part them, seal over them, and air damp and cool is forced into his lungs. A glimpse of blue eyes, sweat beading on his forehead and those lips are over his again, a second breath fills his mouth, pain digging deep in his chest, his eyes fluttering closed. And on the third breath he gags and coughs, blood iron in his mouth, hands rolling him onto his side as he chokes and heaves, a hand cool on the back of his neck and at last, at last, he passes into a sleep more fitful than dangerous.

When, at last, he wakes, it is to the feel of Raoul’s lean body behind him and the taste of bile in his mouth. Christine smiles down at him, raises his hand to her lips, and the last he feels for a long time is her lips kissing the tears from his closed eyes, and blood daubed over his heart.

* * *

 

He cannot play the violin after it, but the storms grow less severe and Christine’s back causes her less pain, so he decides the loss of his music and his journey through the valley of death were worth it.

He instructs Christine, upon his death, to burn the violin.

It frightens her when he talks such, he knows that. But he feels the signs within himself and knows the time is growing close. It’s in the chill around his heart, the stiffness in his bones, how his body will not respond to either of his lover’s gentle ministrations. It’s in the entrails of the animals and the flights of the birds and the stars above. It’s in the new life growing inside Christine.

The island giveth and the island taketh away, but all he asks is for the island to spare Christine and their baby.

He lies beside his lovers, and is ever ready to surrender himself.


	5. 5

The babies come on a cold day in spring, tiny and squalling. There is water heating over the fire, and Christine is lying back against a mound of skins and hides, face deathly pale and damp with sweat. They take it in turns to sit by her side, to knead her belly and let her squeeze their hands and stay silent as her nails puncture their skin. When the time comes, it is Raoul at her side, talking to her and kissing her, and he kneels between her legs, heart oddly steady for having her life and the life of their child in his hands. Carefully he guides first one tiny bloody body into the world while she gasps and she pushes, and passes the baby to Raoul to attend to, and then to the surprise of them all a second baby, both of them screaming to clear their lungs.

Two baby boys, one with his face, and one without.

He and Raoul bathe the babies as she gets her breath, tears trickling down her cheeks, and he tries not to look at his noseless demonic son as they wrap them each in soft deerskin, and settle them into Christine’s waiting arms. She brings them to her breast as he dries her tears and sweat and kisses her, and Raoul’s hands steady her, and at last, both babies held safe, she gives Erik the tenderest smile he has ever seen.

His heart swells, and for the first time since the day he revealed to her his bare face, he cries.

Christine kisses their boys, and insists they are equally perfect.

* * *

 

Such a tiny inoffensive creature, his son who looks like him. Was he as small as this once? He must have been. He must have clung on to someone (his mother, maybe, his own father) desperate for contact, a little baby clinging to one finger with five tiny ones, the way his son clings to him. To think of abandoning something so small, so delicate, so helpless. But his parents were not of an island, would not have understood the ways of the gods, and though he might not always understand them, he knows better than to question them.

The gods sent his sons. The gods decreed one would wear his face. It is not the place of man to question that.

It is beyond him, he knows, to ever keep something so small safe forever. Two small somethings, two little sons. So help him, if it’s the last thing he does, he will make sure one of them knows a life off the island.

For the one in his arms, perhaps, the island is safest.

* * *

 

When she gains her strength enough to stand, she crushes berries that he brings her and adds new paintings to the shelter. Two babies in a basket, their faces equally vague. Two small boys crawling around. Him, two small children sitting in his arms.

The babies sleep, mostly, and he watches over them, or Raoul does. One of them always stays awake, just in case, in case a baby wakes or a panther prowls too close, though in all his years on the island that has only happened a handful of times and since they learned she was expecting, he and Raoul have strengthened his traps, made them wholly impenetrable to any wild beast.

They leave as little as possible.

Still. He and Raoul hold themselves equally in readiness at night. It is their duty to protect their small family, and Christine needs her rest now more than ever.

* * *

 

As she sleeps, and Raoul lies curled around the babies for heat, he sits by the fire and braids. Two tiny ringlets of hair – his and Christine’s and Raoul’s all intertwined – that he slips onto a wrist of each baby. And tiny chains of teeth – snake and panther – that he fastens gently around their necks. Let the island protect its children, as it has protected him.

* * *

 

When, at last, she is strong enough again to make it to the river, they carry the babies out in the basket she wove for them, a deerskin fixed on top to give them shade and protect their delicate skin. Raoul has walked the island, has collected as many different varieties of flowers as he could find, and they crush the petals together to form a pigment. Christine walks into the water, carrying first the son that looks like him, and he anoints the baby’s head with fresh water, smears the flower petal pigment across his forehead. And then she carries their second son to him, the one who takes after her, and he repeats the blessing, and Raoul joins them in the water with the first baby, and Erik sprinkles torn flakes of leaves over them, and bows his head to kiss each delicate soft cheek.

It was his decision, to name a son for Christine. And it was her insistence to name the other for him. And it was the decrees of her and Raoul both, which baby would wear each name

And so their sons are presented to the island.

* * *

 

He is the father of demigods. And he carries the knowledge deep in his chest.


	6. 6

**This is how the story ends**

There is a blood ritual, in the heat of summer. Goat bones and bird feathers and snake venom carefully extracted, Erik’s blood over it all, Erik’s life the casualty of it. The lightning crashes in a summer storm, and he is still breathing as Raoul traces the blood from his wounded arm, binds the incisions, and carries him home, lays him by the fire, but Erik does not wake.

As Raoul warms water, Christine unwraps the binding from his arm, the weakened arm, the arm he massages every morning, watches as blood dark and red oozes from the three incisions. His lips are faintly blue, and gently she kisses them, kisses the wounds, but he doesn’t stir.

Deep in her bones, she knows.

She bathes his face with the warm water Raoul brings her, the face the gods saw fit to grant her son, and with the soft underside of a delicate kidskin she cleans the blood from his arm, dabbing and pressing and smoothing. The slits, splits in the fabric of him, more than any ritual she’s ever seen, any she’s ever done. She takes Raoul’s hand, and cuts his palm with the edge of flint, cuts her own to match it, and presses their wounds together as their blood drips to land on Erik’s arm.

It rolls down skin that seems too white.

It is not a wound to dress in goatskin.

When the storm came up, when she heard the cry it ripped from Erik in the distance, she was collecting fronds, soft and dry, for to nest the babies among. It is their father who needs them more now, and maybe that was why she was doing it, some deep knowledge whispering in her blood. She takes the fronds and binds them around Erik’s arm, hides the incisions, hides their blood. He whimpers, and it is the only noise he makes, his eyelids never flickering.

With their blood, she traces the warm skin of his neck, the acknowledgement of what he has done for them, and with gentleness she lays their babies, asleep, on his chest. She eases herself down on one side of him, twines her fingers with his, and Raoul lies beside his wounded arm, and threads their fingers, Erik’s so long, so still, and so cold.

Together they wait, and watch the firelight flickering over his still face.

The storm dies outside, the wind howls itself to silence, and Erik’s breaths are faint, and weak.

She murmurings blessings in the shell of his ear.

Raoul kisses his neck, and rubs his thumb over his fingers.

Erik’s breath stutters, a whisper of an exhale, and silence.

It is Raoul who feels, carefully, for a pulse beneath their blood on his throat, and it is Raoul who finds it, thready and faint, where it has faded from his wrist. He guides Christine’s fingers to the place, watches the fire glow in her eyes, and closes his mouth over Erik’s. He blows air warm and damp into him, the way he did before, the way he learned once upon a time, far and away from here, in another life.

Christine swallows when he pulls back, and replaces his mouth with hers, gives Erik her breath too the way Raoul taught her, and gently they take it in turns to breathe into him when he makes no effort to breathe for himself. Christine carefully takes the babies from his chest, and lays them down beside her so Raoul has room to dig his knuckles into Erik’s breastbone, to massage his chest with the heel of his palm, and try to remind him of life.

They fill him with their breath fifty times, and he never gasps, his eyelids never flutter, fingers never twitch held safe in theirs.

His pulse is barely perceptible, dimmer than before, when Raoul catches her eye and gives her the slightest shake of his head, and tears prickle her eyes as she settles her babies back onto their father’s chest for the last time, and presses her lips to his ear. She whispers that she releases him, that the island wishes him to rest, that she loves him, and will protect their babies, and the gods are pleased with him. And Raoul does the same, kisses the shell of Erik’s ear and whispers that he relieves him of his duty, that he will protect Christine, and that he may rest now without fear, that he has done well. And finally, finally, when the pulse beneath their fingers skips, and falters, and fails, and his spirit is freed on a sigh, Christine is singing to him softly, and the sky is salmon with coming sunlight. The ringlets and teeth rustle on their hangings, and Christine kisses his lips, and Raoul kisses his closed eyes, and they lie beside his silent body, hands joined over the nestled twins, as their tears trickle in silence.

* * *

 

They wash him in the river, later, while the babies gurgle in their woven basket. Paint the blood of a fresh-killed goat over his scars, their own blood over the wounds on his arm that let the gods call him away, and the blue pigments of crushed flowers around his neck, on his hands. Braid his long hair with fresh flowers and feathers, lay petals beneath his navel and between his legs. They burn the violin and mix some of the ashes with a little of their blood and paint it over his heart. They take breaks only as needed to tend to the babies and settle them again, and Christine sings over his body, and Raoul holds his cold hand and whispers remembered prayers in Latin and French, and they sit a vigil over him all night, the fire burning bright, until the moon begins to sink and they kiss his still lips for the last time, and she sews him into his finest deerskin while Raoul digs.

They bury him when dawn is breaking, beneath a rock painted in his own blood, both of them weeping, then return to the shelter and lie with two smiling babies between them, innocently unaware of what has happened.

Raoul fasts, and Christine bleeds, her arms raw.

Neither feel pain, all swallowed in emptiness.

And perhaps it would have happened anyway, or perhaps the island, witness to Erik’s sacrifice, saw fit to spare those he left behind, but the waters come to life and the wind blows, and a ship lands safely barely a week later.

The first man to step ashore is Raoul’s brother.

The second spent twenty-four years searching for Erik, and signed on in vain hope of finding him, only to miss him by days.

Raoul holds the twins close and faces his brother, and Christine takes Nadir by the hand.

She leads him inland along the river, through the trees and the wildflower meadows, over the rocks, past the rise where she lay with Erik the day the twins were conceived, to the shelter, and the grave where he lies. The clay is still soft and dark with freshness, the heaviness of it rising to their noses. And Nadir looks from the blood-painted stones, to the leather stretched thin over woven branches, to the tanned and defiant young woman before him, breasts bare and a goatskin wrapped around her waist, red gashes on her arms healing and fresh, her long blonde hair bleached almost white with the sun, and understands.

“I can see how Erik would have loved you,” he murmurs. She kisses his forehead, and squeezes his hand.

* * *

 

The moon sets full, and day breaks calm and blue. Christine and Raoul look down upon the island, upon the sunlight glistening gold on the water, and think of a sacrifice made, a pair of golden eyes closed forever. They whisper to each other, and kiss, and understand. They sprinkle their blood over the earth that holds Erik safe, and together leave the island, with their two babies and a collection of relics: a necklace of teeth, a braid of black-grey hair, the ashes of a violin, a tattered mask, and a flat stone painted with blood. And the goatskin where they slept and loved and held each other, where the twins first breathed life, and upon which Erik breathed his last.

They are the only ones who listen, and hear the music drifting soft through the trees.

**This is the story she will tell her sons**

The story of how she was cast off a ship because of the foolishness of men. How the tide saved her and carried her to the island, brought her to their father. And he taught her to live, to hunt, to sew with needles of bone and make clothes of goatskin. He played the violin of her father and they sang through the winter storms, and did all they could to appease the gods, and held each other through the darkness, and knew their love as blessed. And when the tide brought Raoul to join them, he became one of them, and blessed their love with his.

And when the time came, and her tiny precious boys were born, their father loved them just as well as he could, and died to save them.

And little Christopher must not be ashamed because he wears his father’s face. And little Erik has his father’s eyes and skilful hands, and in a forest at the foot of a mountain, away from the prying eyes of men who would not understand, they will both learn to listen to the gods.

**This is what will happen after**

The two boys will invent stories of wild panthers for their younger half-siblings. Someday they will grow into men, will stand tall and proud, long dark hair hanging down their backs in braids, and with the connections of their living father’s brother, and their dead father’s once-lover, they will charter their own ship, and bring the chains of teeth and braids of hair they wore as babies, and seek out the island on which they were born.

The will walk inland along the trail their mother and living father have described, have told them of since they were the smallest of babies so that they will know it as well as if they remember it, and Christopher will be playing a violin, and Erik will sing in a voice high and clear, and they will weave flowers together and lengths of their cut hair, and stop at the place where their dead father lies. Beneath the glow of a summer’s full moon, they will cut their palms and offer their blood to the gods, his blood that flows in them, so that his bones may be protected safe forever, and his rest never disturbed.

They will observe the rituals their mother taught them, will hunt with the skills from their living father, will give voice to the music in their blood from their dead father and send it out for the island to hear and understand. By crackling firelight they will braid each other’s hair, and paint each other in blood, and they will sing to the stars, the way they learned amongst the trees as boys.

They will remain three moon cycles, the ship kept safely offshore for them under a spell of their mother’s weaving, and their fathers’ blessings (both fathers, living and dead).

And someday, after they depart, they will return. Older, wiser. They will sense in their bones the tightening of time, and upon that day their mother will set foot on the island once more, their living father alongside her (as dear to them as their dead father, still cradled safe by the island.) And with their half-siblings the boys, now men, hair sprinkled lightly silver, will wait for the end of what went before, with violin and goatskins and braided hair, all reduced to ash.

The island will know its returning children. The island will wait.


End file.
